July 30, 2018

For a while there, we thought we'd driven you into a stalemate; the cost of high-potency anti-aids drugs went from $10,000 a person in 1996 down to $75 per year. But then things went south:

The drugs didn’t cure anybody—HIV still lurks in the bodies of the nearly 22 million treated individuals.

Any interruption in treatment allowed the virus to emerge from its hiding places and re-infect the patient. Plenty of interruptions occurred. Today, the number of infected people is estimated at at least 37 million, worldwide. The number of resultant fatalities is expected to be staggering.

June 02, 2018

"A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Clintonium. Clintonium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These particles are held together by light and dark particles called radical moreons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. The atomic symbol for Clintonium is CL - short for CLOTS. Clintonium's mass actually increases over time, as radical moreons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons within the Clintonium molecule, leading to the formation of iso-dopes. The characteristic of iso-dope promotion leads some scientists to believe that Clintonium is formed whenever radical moreons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Moredumba@$. When catalyzed with tax money, Clintonium activates CNNadnauseum, an element that radiates orders of magnitude of more energy, albeit as incoherent noise, since it has half as many peons but twice as many iso-dope forming radical moreons as Clintonium."

May 28, 2018

"Does it Fart? The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence" published by Hachette books has shot to No. 8 on the New York Times monthly best-seller list in the science category since it was released in April.

Spoiler: birds don't fart. Neither do sloths, probably because everything about them is slow....

May 19, 2018

Having evidently recognized the futility of searching for intelligent life in Washington:

The U.S. House of Representatives has proposed a bill that includes $10 million in NASA funding for the next two years "to search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions, in order to meet the NASA objective to search for life's origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe."

April 23, 2018

Uranus smells like your anus. Scientists have directly observed a molecule in the planet’s deep atmosphere that confirms Uranus’s stench. That molecule is hydrogen sulfide.

The team peered deep into Uranus’s atmosphere, at and below the part we might call its “surface,” using the Gemini-North’s Near-infrared Integral Field Spectrometer in Hawaii. They report that they’ve directly detected the molecule at around 0.4-0.8 parts per million as ice in its cloud tops. They measured more hydrogen sulfide than ammonia, and also the exact concentration of hydrogen sulfide required to produce a rotten-egg fart smell. They published their paper today in Nature Astronomy.

Well, we aren't planning to go there anyway; it's not suitable for habitation, and now we know it stinks.

April 06, 2018

Maybe they should just go back to eating Tide pods, or something equally constructive. 16% of them "aren't sure" whether the planet is flat or whether it's spherical. But they should determine firearms policies....

Young millennials, ages 18 to 24, are likelier than any other age group to say they believe the Earth is flat (4%).

March 29, 2018

A newly discovered network of fluid-filled channels in the human body may be a previously-unknown organ, and it seems to help transport cancer cells around the body.

Theise reckons that every tissue in the body may be surrounded by a network of these channels, which essentially form an organ. The team estimate that the organ contains around a fifth of the total fluid volume of the human body. “We think they act as shock absorbers,” says Theise.

This organ was likely never seen before because standard approaches for processing and visualising human tissue causes the channels to drain, and the collagen fibres that give the network its structure to collapse in on themselves. This would have made the channels appear like a hard wall of dense protective tissue, instead of a fluid-filled cushion.

But as well as protecting organs, the network may also aid the spread of cancer.

That's because once cancer cells get into the network, they can travel anywhere in the body. Metastasis has never been well understood, but this discovery may well have revealed how the cancerous cells travel.

March 20, 2018

CBS Local — A revolutionary new stem cell treatment is giving doctors hope of developing a cure for blindness within the next five years. The experimental therapy has reportedly given two patients, who were both losing their sight, the ability to read again.

With only two patients, it's a bit early to celebrate, but it's an interesting step - at least for those with "wet" age-related macular degeneration.